/via Shawn Blanc.

The Hobbit: Part 1 is coming in 2012 but it is being filmed right now. How can you keep up with the news? Here are a few resources I’ve tucked away to check in on now and then.

• The Hobbit Blog – Official blog
• The Hobbit on Facebook – Official Facebook page
• The Hobbit Movie – Fan site
• The Hobbit Movie News – Fan site.

Don’t let the titles and URLs fool you – each of these are different sites. Here is hoping these sites and others do as good a job digging into the making of this movie for the rest of this year as they did for Lord of the Rings and King Kong.

Thanks to Apple for providing a solution in relatively short order.

Today Apple released the third version of their iPhone OS aptly named iPhone OS 3.0. This release boasts several improvements and new features – however, not all of them are available on the first-generation iPhone.

But, lets stay positive. So, what do you get if you upgrade your first-generation iPhone to the latest version of the OS? Here’s a list.

What you will actually get with iPhone OS 3.0 on the original iPhone

• Spotlight search: In a search screen to the left of your first home screen there is now a new search box that searches your entire iPhone including music, contacts, email, etc. It works great. Just like the update to Spotlight in Leopard changed the way I used my computer I believe the addition of Spotlight on my iPhone will change the way I find, use, and open things on my iPhone.
• Cut, Copy and Paste: Something that has been missing from the iPhone since the very first day but now seems so at home and well done. Copying text, photos, URLs, addresses, just about anything – from any app, and pasting into any application. Everyone knew Apple could pull this off better than anyone else and they have.
• A new Messages app: The SMS application has been replaced with the new Message application that handles MMS messages. This will allow the sending of audio, photo, and text messages. I say will because for those of us in the US and using AT&T, MMS isn’t yet supported. There are several other additions to this application, however, with much it a much more well rounded application overall. Two quick examples are the new way it sends messages without stopping you from moving onto something else and the ability to delete individual messages rather than just clearing the entire conversation.
• Voice memos: An application that I’m sure will come in handy (though you could have purchased or downloaded a number of applications that have been available through the App Store that do something similar) where you can quickly record some audio and email it (and soon MMS it) to anyone. I’d be willing to bet the utility of this application will come with time.
• Note syncing: Although notes now sync through iTunes they are unfortunately synced with Mail.app only (I’d rather them be in a directory in my Documents directory). I don’t use Mail.app so I am not sure how this will help me right now. I’ve been waiting for this, again, since iPhone OS 1.0 and am now disappointed in its implementation.
• Shake to shuffle: Open iTunes, play a song, shake your phone, and iTunes will randomly choose another song from your iPhone to play. Simple, fun.
• iTunes Store and App Store updates: You can now buy and rent movies and TV shows directly from your iPhone. The App Store application has a few updates as well including the ability to redeem applications (or credit from gift cards) (perhaps for beta testing purposes for applications). It also has a much improved interface for showing the screenshots from an application.
• The smaller updates: Several smaller updates like speed improvements, bug fixes, a few aesthetic things (like icons), and improvements like showing the phone number type (mobile or home) and location (city, state) in the Recents menu on the Phone application are among them. These are the types of updates that go mostly unnoticed by news outlets but those of us that use our iPhones for hours a day will thoroughly enjoy.

I think I covered most everything. iPhone OS 3.0 is a very, very big release for the iPhone OS and so there are a vast number of improvements that I simply could not list here.

What you do not get with iPhone OS 3.0 on the original iPhone

There are several things that you do not get with the update. I won’t list the things you don’t get due to not having the new lens, or magnometer such as focusing, and the compass related features, etc.

• Internet Tethering: Even though AT&T hasn’t enabled tethering via the iPhone yet, same as with MMS, this will never be available for the first generation iPhone. From what I’ve read it seems a limitation based on the EDGE antenna built into the iPhone.
• Voice Controls: Presumably due to resource limitations on the iPhone, Voice Controls are not available on the first-generation iPhone. The iPhone 3G, which shares nearly the same specs as the original iPhone, also does not support this feature. Which I find sort of odd. The Google Mobile App uses similar technology of voice recognition (and it even sends the data to the Web for interpretation) and it works just fine on my iPhone. I see two reasons for this being excluded: 1. Apple wants something even more to juice up the iPhone 3G S’s offering. Which this certainly does. 2. The Voice Controls applications does all of the interpretation on the iPhone itself instead of sending it to the service like Google’s application does and so it really is a restriction of the hardware in the iPhone and iPhone 3G.
• Video recording and editing: Although the new video recording capabilities are not solely based on the new lens in the iPhone 3G S the ability to record, playback, and edit the video are probably the result of the new hardware (ie. CPU, and RAM) in it.
• MMS: Thanks, or I should say no thanks, to Jacob Burke for letting me know that MMS will not be available on the original iPhone. This is, by far, the most disappointing thing that will not be available. Now I’m bummed.

That about wraps it up. The iPhone OS 3.0 update is extremely well done and a much appreciated update from Apple for all iPhone and iPod touch owners. I’m very much looking forward to updating my iPhone to the iPhone 3G S in the future and enjoying the things I’m missing now.

If you have an iPhone 3G and are wondering what you’ll get from this update, Apple has create a page just for you (hat tip: Mike Stickel).

If I missed something, and I’m sure I did, please be sure to make me aware of it via the comments and I’ll update the post promptly.

Photo credit: Erik Kastner

Here is how I’m doing it. I’m posting both mobile photos and notes with the WordPress iPhone application. If I have something to share that I can’t fit into 140-characters, I will be logging those posts into the mobile notes category. Rather than posting my mobile photos to Flickr or Brightkite I’ll be sharing them in the mobile photos category. The WordPress iPhone application automatically resizes the photos to no more than 640-pixels wide. Both the mobile notes and photos will be linked to from Twitter, automatically, using a similar syntax of “Mobile photo: “Title of photo” – LINK”.

The script I’m using for this is the same one I was using for posting photos, links, etc to Pownce. I’ve since updated it and will be sharing that code here once I’ve licked a few bugs, integrated it with Bit.ly instead of TinyURL, and made it a little easier to configure. I’m using Dreamhost’s fairly simple CRON job panel to run this script every 10 minutes. Stay tuned for that code in the near future.

I’ve also made a slight change to the way the Mobile photos category is displayed. Instead of just showing the title of the mobile photo this page now shows a small thumbnail of the image. Since these images can be in both portrait and landscape modes, I had to do some jiggery pokery to only show a portion of the image, without resizing them. Thanks to Jason Santa Maria for helping me with some of the CSS.

Viewing these pages on a mobile phone with a browser that supports text only will still be a bear, I’m sure, but they should load much faster now on iPhones, iPod touches, Android-powered phones, and the upcoming Palm Pre.

For my next trick, I’ll be changing the way the videos category and posts are displayed.

Reading the changelog you can see that this is a fairly large release when you weigh it against previous versions. You can also see that it has been one of the longest periods of time between releases. This is most likely due to Todd Ditchendorf, the developer of Fluid, taking on the much more challenging task of creating a full-fledged Web browser called Cruz.

On the Fluid blog Todd mentions that “This release incorporates most of the features and fixes that went into Cruz 0.1…”. That makes me happy, since I’m not a big fan of Cruz, but am a big fan of Fluid. At least the work Todd is doing on Cruz doesn’t mean that Fluid is being left behind. Kudos to him for developing in this manner.

Source: Fluid.

When I switched to this theme in April of this year I had created two header images that would display at random on each page refresh. I had aspirations “to some day find the time to have as many as ten random header images”. Later that month I had 10 total header images. As of today I have created about 40 header images for this site, 24 of which are active.

In August of this year, after visiting a Peter Lik gallery in Las Vegas, I had decided to spruce up the random header images on this site by also changing the color of the background, or frame, of the site based on the image being displayed. This added a lot of fun to creating the images for me and I hope that as people found this site they too enjoyed the display of them.

As of today, however, we’re kicking it up a notch.

The first update that I made is that now the link color also changes when the header image and background color do. This small adjustment makes it feel just a little bit more refined then just changing the background color. Some of the background colors I had originally chosen were a little too light to read on white. So I had to make a few small adjustments to the color choices I made. This has two interesting side effects the first being that I now have 4 or 5 brand new “looks” for this site. Just by making a new color choice for each. The other side effect is that I now have to choose colors that are readable on white. For better or worse, I’m not sure yet.

The second update is one I’m really excited to talk about because I have yet to see how it will effect the site overall. The headers are no longer totally random. The way it worked prior to today was that when the page loaded I allowed PHP ((The programming language this site is written in.)) to choose a random number between 1 and 24 – and I’d use that number to determine the header image to show. It was incredibly simple, worked well, and made for each refresh to be a surprise!

In an effort to make the selection of which header image to show a smarter process I’ve added two layers of complexity to how a header image is chosen in addition to the random selection. This might get confusing, if it does, sorry.

If you visit the home page of the site, or any sub-page like the about page, it will figure out what time of day it is ((Here in the eastern United States.)) and display one of many images I’ve designated for that time of day. I have images categorized as morning, day, evening, and night. I’ve split up the hours using the 24-hour clock this way; 6am-12pm = morning, 12pm-5pm = day, 5pm-9pm = evening, 9pm-6am = night.  I may adjust those time slots but that is where they are now. I have several images for each time of day. So on these pages you will still be getting a randomly selected header, but it will be randomly selected based on the current time of day, rather than from the entire pool.

If you visit a note, photo, mobile photo, etc. on this site you will be shown an image contextually. What I mean is that for each header image I have associated a tag to it. The tag may describe what is in the image, where the image was taken, or something the image has to do with. I then compare the tags that are associated to the post you’re currently reading and create a list of matching headers.  If there are one or more matches the site randomly displays one of those matches.  If there are no matches the site reverts to the time of day method.

So what does this all mean? Well, I’m not sure yet as the system still has some randomness to it. But generally speaking, if you are reading a post about my trip to Hawai’i, like this one, or this one, you should see a header related to Hawai’i. If you are reading a post about animals, you’ll see a header that probably has animals in it. If you are watching a video about food, then a header relating to food will most likely be displayed. And, again, if you are reading about New York City or Philadelphia - those headers will show up.

I’m still fine tuning the way that the site decides which header best fits the current post being shown but so far in my testing it has done a pretty good job.

But, such as it is you are here, reading something on my site, and so I should – at the very least – show you a site that you can read. I didn’t say that I’d cater to you. No no, none of that here. But I will try my best to have my site display just well enough that you can read this – and perhaps switch to another browser.

While at Podcamp Hawai’i I pulled my site up on a screen in front of an entire theatre full of people. There was only one computer available to me that was already hooked up to the projector. I thought “How bad could it be?”. Well, it was pretty bad. My site looked like this. Yeah, that bad.

So today I pulled out a ton of negative margins, a few class specifications that, for reasons I will probably never know, Internet Explorer does not support – and now you can see that the site looks relatively normal in IE.

I could probably do better with my site’s document code and styling to set myself up for multi-browser success. I know this. But, seriously. You could do much better if you’re using Internet Explorer as your browser-of-choice. So there.

As I was going through my photos from Las Vegas, which I’m still not done publishing yet, I thought of framing them the way Peter Lik does.  Peter Lik’s framing work is what makes his work so great.  If he has a photo of bamboo from South East Asia, he actually uses bamboo to frame the over-sized photo. If you’ve never been to a Peter Lik gallery, and you’re a photo nut, please do yourself a favor and drop in.

Then I had a thought. If I’m going to turn some of these photos into header images for my site, why not “frame” them the way Peter Lik would.  I can’t, without a lot of work, wrap my site in bamboo shoots. But I can, at the very least, change the background color of my site to “frame” the header.

So that is what I’ve now done.  Refresh this or any page of my site to see some of the color / photo combinations I have so far.  As of this writing there are 15 combinations ((As soon as I can I will create a page for you to be able to view them all without the need of refreshing so often.)).

Oh, as an aside: By removing that old paper bag background I also slimmed my page load time quite a lot. So there is a double-benefit!  I think the paper bag background was around 214Kb.

These changes are really, really small.  Unless you come to this site on a daily basis (you do, don’t you?) you may not notice any of them.  A pixel here, a color adjustment there, an array sorting issue here, a speed improvement there. But these changes were mounting up.  Even browsing my site myself, looking for old entries, I became annoyed with some of the existing bugs because I knew I had already fixed them on my local install.

So today, while I’m running out to spend the weekend in The Finger Lakes region of New York for a wine festival, I published these “little things” to the live site.  I wish there was a way I could calculate the changes (perhaps I should be using Subversion or something), but my guess would be somewhere in the hundreds.  I still have some things that I’d love to get around to adjusting, but they’ll have to wait for the next update.

So, if you’re feeling adventurous, go ahead and poke around.

• user description is no longer HTML-entity converted going into the database
• plugins are sorted by plugin name, instead of filename
• the authors dropdown is now sorted by display_name

There are several bugs that have been addressed as well, and those are important, but these little things have also annoyed me for awhile. Remember, this is currently a release candidate – a full release will be coming soon.

[tags]wordpress, updates[/tags]

Flickr provides me with a great way to share photos with friends and family, and it has some useful tools for me to tag (categorize) as well as geotag (or note where I took the photo), and it lets me connect with different sets of people by using Flickr’s groups. These are all great. However the data that I put into Flickr is not mine and without using the API I will never be able to benefit too greatly from putting in the time it takes to utilize all of Flickr’s tools.

Del.icio.us is a great way to post your favorite URLs, tag (categorize) them, and make some small notes. Obviously there is the entire community aspect too though I’ve never taken full advantage of any of them. Also I do not use del.icio.us (boy is that annoying to type everytime) as my bookmark storage solution.

So I don’t fully utilize the two major web services that I would otherwise really like to — so perhaps something else could be done to openly share data and yet reap the most benefit from the time I put into cataloging it. I think my personal site is the perfect platform for this, and I’m going to start making both dramatic and subtle changes to the site and its architecture in order to do this.

Please “stand by” while I make some adjustments (which will probably take a total of two or three weeks to make, though you should start seeing some of these changes within the next few days).

[tags]cdevroe.com, updates, flickr, delicious, bookmarks, photos, sharing, web services, api[/tags]

One of the biggest complaints I’ve had since launching cdevroe.com was that there was no clear navigation between the main areas of the site. I was one of the complainers myself.

On Friday I decided to take a trip to Panera Bread to soak up some free wifi and some grub. I did this to get a slight change of scenery, and to focus on finishing what was the core of this redesign. The changes you see may not seem very extensive, but most of the changes will end up going rather unnoticed until I actually unleash each and every feature of this theme. Its current incarnation is not quite as robust as its final one will be, which will be released incrementally.

Me eating a panini at Panera Bread

Panera’s atmosphere is actually fairly conducive to GTD. So I was able to pump out a fairly good portion of work in the amount of time it took my wife to do some shopping.

Credit for the small, yet fantastic, adjustments to the theme go to James Mathias who sacrificed some of his weekend for me. It is definitely nice to have friend that is willing to give you some of their well earned time off. Thanks a lot James – I owe you one.

Monday, July 3rd, 2006 – My site now validates as valid CSS and XHTML 1.0 Transitional.

[tags]cdevroe.com, james mathias, panera bread, colin devroe, photos, website, updates, wordpress, theme[/tags]